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06/24/2016

UCLA Anderson Dean Judy Olian has spent much of her time recently meeting with alumni on campus, across the country and internationally. One of the most important elements in her most recent “State of the School” presentations has been the school’s excellent record of faculty recruitment, one of the ways Anderson continues to meet the needs of the always evolving landscapes in both research and the classroom.

Simply put, it’s just one of the ways the school continues to Think in the Next. After welcoming eight new members to its globally renowned faculty last year, UCLA Anderson has added 10 this year.

Dominique Hanssens might well consider UCLA Anderson home, as this is where he has spent his entire academic career, serving in a variety of roles and capacities that include faculty chair, associate dean and marketing area chair. Along the way he has collected numerous honors and awards, authored and co-authored a host of published papers, books and book chapters, consulted with large corporations, served on numerous committees and editorial boards, been interviewed by top broadcast and print media, and expanded his academic horizons as the 2005–07 executive director of the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) in Cambridge. He is a pioneer in the use of what is now known as “big data” in marketing, focusing his research on strategic marketing problems, in particular marketing productivity, in which he applies his expertise in data-analytic methods. Several industries, including hospitality, airline and banking, adopted his research to develop and advance their ongoing marketing strategies.

In November 2015, Hanssens officially retired from his teaching responsibilities, but he is far from relinquishing his ties to the school. Indeed, he remains director of the Morrison Family Center for Marketing Studies and Data Analytics and continues working with and mentoring Ph.D. students. He also continues his research endeavors as Distinguished Research Professor of Marketing at UCLA.

Hanssens took time from his still busy schedule to ponder the years he has spent here on the myriad activities with which he has been involved and the roles he has played as teacher, researcher, corporate partner and groundbreaking analyst in the area of marketing.

Q: What prompted your interest in marketing analytics?

I first became interested in an academic career during my undergraduate program in Antwerp, Belgium. My interest in marketing analytics was prompted by a former MIT professor who got me thinking of pursuing a Ph.D. in the U.S. But it was while I was at Purdue that a guest lecturer piqued my interest in time-series models in marketing, an area I found fascinating. You need a lot of passion for a topic to make it through a Ph.D., tenure, etc., and I found that I had a passion for this type of work.

Q: You are often asked about your work in the area of big data, but your research and efforts predate that more modernly recognized industry. Where did your work begin?

My research has been focused on answering the question, “How well does marketing work?” It really began with an early project I did with just one sheet of data and a little model to find out how marketing, in this case price changes versus advertising spending could affect brand sales. Consider the fact that just two elements of marketing — sales calls and advertising — represent about 10 percent of the economy. Ours is an $18 trillion economy, so about $1.8 trillion is spent on sales calls and advertising. It’s a huge portion of economic activity.

“Having this journal on this list is important, as FT counts the per capita faculty publications in these journals to calculate the research ranking of faculty,” says Chris Tang, current editor-in-chief of M&SOM and distinguished professor and holder of the Edward W. Carter Chair in Business Administration at UCLA Anderson School of Management. “This research score accounts for 10 percent of the Global MBA, Executive MBA and online MBA rankings.”

The FT journal list, developed in 2003, initially included 40 journals, adding five more in 2012. In 2016, FT invited the deans of 210 business schools to suggest journals to be dropped from or added to the list. Based on the votes submitted by 140 business schools worldwide, four journals were dropped and nine out of 150 journals that were nominated were added to the FT list. The M&SOM was among the most recent additions.

06/03/2016

Variety may be the spice of life, but does it also increase happiness? That’s the proverbial question that drove Cassie Mogilner Holmes, associate professor of marketing, to find an answer. Holmes, who recently joined UCLA Anderson from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, has focused on this and other inquiries into happiness for the better part of her academic career.

Her research, published in many top-tier publications, examines a variety of questions, such as how focusing on time (rather than money) increases happiness, how the meaning of happiness changes over the course of one’s lifetime, how giving time to others can alleviate the stress of feeling time constrained, and how much happiness people enjoy from spending their time on extraordinary and ordinary experiences.

Her latest endeavor, “Does Variety among Activities Increase Happiness?” to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research, explores how the variety among the activities that fill people’s day-to-day lives affects their happiness. The findings may seem almost counterintuitive: Spending time on more varied activities often leads to greater happiness — but not always. For longer time periods (like a day or a week), more varied activities increase subsequent happiness by making that time feel more stimulating. However, for shorter time periods (like 30 minutes or an hour), more varied activities instead decrease subsequent happiness by undermining people’s sense of productivity. Sharing her empirical findings in classes that include Advertising and Marketing Communications as well as Strategic Brand Management, Holmes will provide students with a better understanding of the emotional experience that drives consumers’ decision-making and day-to-day living.

01/19/2016

On January 5, I had a chance to be a panelist at a discussion titled Enhancing Opportunities in the Transatlantic Market: Best Practices for SMEs and Startups Including Innovative Finance, organized by the European-American Enterprise Council and the U.S. Commerce Department, alongside the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

TradeUp director Kimberly Benson moderated the seven-member panel of people who help make business and investments flow across the Atlantic. The tips I offered to U.S. and European entrepreneurs that look to alternative financing platforms to raise capital include:

Do your homework. With financing platforms proliferating, companies need to do their homework to find the right fit in terms of sector, size, size and type of raise, types of investors (e.g., angels vs. institutionals), and preferred monetization model (e.g., commission vs. subscription). Household name platforms are not necessarily the best bet: research the market for providers that are working on, and have investors for, companies like yours.

Consider alignment of interests. If you want the platform to be on your side, follow the money. Consider how the platform is paid. If the platform makes money on raises that succeed, it is interested in helping you raise; if it makes money on monthly subscriptions, it has an interest in filling the platform with companies like yours. You may want to work with the former set — and make sure you work with a team licensed to market your raise (act as broker-dealer) and is in compliance with U.S. financial regulations.

Be proactive: Advertising your raise on a platform is just the start. It gets you 5 percent of the way to your goal. Even if you have an expert platform team promoting your raise, they are not inside your business. It is your job to keep the fundraising team up to date on developing within your business and with your clients. It is also your job to market and do PR for your business and generate buzz useful for your raise. And it is your job to close an investor coming through a platform — so do perfect your pitch.

TradeUp is keen to work with European companies coming to the U.S. market and U.S. companies expanding to Europe. Headquartered in Los Angeles, the firm also has a presence in London and staff that speaks seven European languages. Contact TradeUp if you are looking to cross the Atlantic and need capital and counsel alike.

Kati Suominen is a visiting assistant adjunct professor at UCLA Anderson and founder and CEO of TradeUp. Her post originally appeared on the TradeUp blog. Suominen will travel to Davos, Switzerland, this month to participate in the Economist’s keynote discussion on digital ecosystems, coinciding with the 2016 World Economic Forum.

UCLA Anderson’s own Keith Chen, associate professor of economics and head of economic research for Uber, was first to take the stage. Known in academe for blurring the lines between economics, psychology and biology, Chen may be best known in the wider world for his design of Uber’s now famous “surge” pricing model.

For those who’ve been relying on a unicycle as their primary mode of transportation for the last five or so years, Uber is the alternative that turned paid transportation models on their heads, nearly driving the taxi industry out of business and in the process disrupting the entire transportation space. This is thanks in large part to Chen’s surge pricing model, which is based on the simple law of supply and demand. Surge calculates a higher fare for rides in certain geographic regions identified by a combination of mapping technologies to create spatial grids that provide a dense view of the world. This allows Uber to break the whole wide world into manageable grids so that when demand is high in a certain area, rates increase and drivers earn more per ride. Riders have the choice to wait out the “surge” in price by staying put or to accept the higher fare.

This fall quarter, the UCLA/J&J Management Development Institute (MDI) returned to Africa for the tenth year to celebrate the anniversary milestone of the program, dedicated to enhancing the entrepreneurial leadership and management capacity of sub-Saharan African health organizations that support underserved populations. Housed in the Harold and Pauline Price Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, MDI’s ultimate goal is broad strengthening of health systems in East Africa, South Africa and West Africa.

12/21/2015

Last October, the UCLA/Johnson & Johnson Health Care Institute (HCI) received a $4.1 million grant that will enable it to expand its health literacy training program to some of America’s most underserved children and families. HCI’s unique comprehensive approach to health empowerment strengthens management capacity in early childhood organizations and equips families with knowledge and skills to better manage their health needs and create a healthy home environment. The funding is part of a new five-year, $33.4 million grant from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to develop the National Center on Early Childhood Health and Wellness (NCECHW).

Established in 2001, the HCI (housed at UCLA Anderson in the Harold and Pauline Price Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation) has trained 120,000 Head Start families in 10 languages across 50 states. Its training methodology is used by over 300 Head Start grantees nationwide. HCI’s methodology has been tested for over 15 years and has consistently delivered significant outcomes in improving knowledge, changing behaviors and reducing unnecessary utilization of health care services.

“We believe that school readiness begins with health,” says Ariella Herman, research director and principal investigator of HCI and long-time faculty member of UCLA Anderson School of Management. “When the kids are healthy, they are in school, they are learning more and are more productive.”

The UCLA Anderson Blog recently asked Dr. Herman to reflect on the history of the program and offer some insight into the significance of its new grant.

Q: So, how did the program progress from the beginning?

When we started, our first topic was common childhood illnesses because we believe that parents with children aged zero to five are really interested in getting this kind of education. Every parent you know cares about their child, no matter where they come from. So we use a book called What to Do When Your Child Gets Sick, but we realized that it’s not about the book, it’s about making parents feel empowered in the decision making when it comes to their child’s health. For the first five years of HCI, we focused only on the topic of common childhood illnesses and saw how the Head Start programs applied the concepts to fit their community and families.

Q: How did the program grow?

What we realized over time is that when you’re able to empower families they want more. And while we were traveling around the country, we realized that there are additional critical health issues facing these families, such as poor oral health, which is a terrible epidemic in some communities. Another critical area is prenatal care because of the percentage of teenage pregnancy; and then there are obesity and diabetes. The powerful message was that we could use the same methodology no matter what health topic we addressed.

12/15/2015

By Sanford Jacoby, Howard Noble Distinguished Professor of Management and Organizations and Director of the Nozawa Fellowship Program

UCLA Anderson celebrated the 30th Anniversary of its Nozawa Fellowship program with a reception at the International House of Japan on November 11, 2015. The program was founded 30 years ago with a generous gift to the school from the late George Nozawa and his wife, Kimiko. Since its inception, the program has helped more than 50 students from Japan to accomplish their academic goals in Anderson’s MBA and doctoral programs.

Mr. Nozawa, a Japanese-American businessman who imported Panasonic consumer products, created the endowment to bring Japanese business students to UCLA, and to serve as a catalyst to increase contacts between the business communities of Japan and the United States. The program is unique because it is the only fellowship dedicated to helping non-sponsored Japanese students to study at a business school in the United States. All non-sponsored applicants from Japan to UCLA Anderson are automatically considered for the Nozawa Fellowship.

11/30/2015

On Friday, November 20, UCLA Anderson hosted Big Data: Big Impact with executives and thought leaders from all over the world coming together to discuss big data.

The conference is part of Big Data Week, one of the most unique global platforms of interconnected community events focusing on the social, political and technological impacts of big data. The conversations on Friday covered a variety of topics, ranging from a general discussion about why big data matters in the 21st century to a more focused conversation on using big data to improve marketing strategies.

Dominique Hanssens, Bud Knapp Distinguished Professor of Marketing and faculty director of the new Morrison Family Center for Marketing Studies and Data Analytic sat UCLA Anderson, moderated the first discussion among panelists, who talked about the impact on consumers as well as the effect of big data socially and globally.